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04 November 2015

A Topps Star Wars: Journey to the Force Awakens Sketch Card of Princess Leia by Robert Teranishi

I am still in Arkansas and I still have a poor internet connection, so again I've got a short one-card post. This is a Princess Leia sketch by Robert Teranishi from Topps Star Wars: Journey to the Force Awakens. I think it's a pretty cool design, with a nice minimalist design. What I find less cool is that it's not really a 1 / 1, as there are multiple copies of essentially the same stenciled sketch card out there.

Here is a scan I pulled of one from eBay. It looks like maybe he used some kind of block printing or stenciling or something because all the elements are the same, but they line up just a little bit differently. You can see on my card that the black at the top of Leia's head runs into the red, but on this other card the edges match up a little better. There are a few minor differences, so I think maybe he stenciled the design and then filled in the inks by hand rather than using some kind of mechanical printing process.

In the end I still like the card, so it doesn't really matter that he did multiple similar sketches. Teranishi kind of has a reputation on the forums I read as a guy who cuts corners and reuses elements to increase the number of cards he gets into a product. If you do an eBay search for his name you can see many cards that use duplicate elements. He's not the only one who does it, as I mentioned in my Star Wars Masterwork box break. I guess if the payment structure is set up to reward quantity, you are going to have artists who take advantage of it.

Teranishi actually got widely panned for his Masterwork cards on the Blowout forums for a different reason. Instead of his usual stencil work that plays with negative space he did a bunch of faint pencil sketches for that product. I think the main problem is that the subtle differences in shading don't scan well, so they look worse in pictures than they do in-hand. But a lot of people seemed disappointed when pulling one of his pieces from Masterwork, although the price tag and some of the really crazy stuff that came from that product really set the bar high. A pencil sketch with no background really stood out when other artists were doing fully-inked and painted cards with full backgrounds. If you get a good scan of his sketches from Masterwork you can see that there is actually quite a bit of detail on them, but from a distance or on a poor scan it does look kind of like he drew an outline of the character and scribbled in some shading. I guess you could go either way on his work. He doesn't appear to have much of a web presence at all, so I can't link you to a gallery of his work or anything. It looks like he's done some comic book covers and maybe some interior pages as well over the last couple of decades.

4 comments:

I've lately become intrigued by the process of creating sketch cards, so I find this all very interesting.

I'll throw out another possibility: An artist could create the desired image up front, and then project that image on to the drawing surface so that the projected image can be used as a guide when creating the sketch cards, with the results being multiple similar cards, but all of them technically hand-drawn and unique. ...But that's just an idea based on things I've seen, I have no idea what Teranishi's methods are.

Beautiful card. I'd be a little disappointed if I discovered this after making a purchase. However... now that I know the fact... if I came across an affordable copy, I think I'd be okay with picking one of these up.

Yeah, it was a little irritating at first but I am still happy with the card I got. It's a nice piece for my collection. It would probably bother me more if I had paid more for the sketch. At least this turn of events gives me a little story to remember each time I look at the card.

About Me

The intention of my blogs is to focus on my hobbies, but they often wind up covering other things instead. My dormant blog, The Raz File, is centered on miniature wargames and painting. My other blog, The Raz Card Blog, is about trading cards and collectibles.